doc@cxsea.UUCP (Documentation ) (03/27/86)
Henry Spencer, I think you may be overstating things a bit, in analogizing shuttle engineers at M-T to officers and soldiers in time of war. I won't rehash all the flames you've surely received, but I do want to make a point about treaties and criminal law. And scapegoats. Yes, the Geneva convention has the force of law in the United States. So does the Strategic Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty (or whatever its called), which the Senate has also ratified. Recently here in Seattle, a number of ACLU attorneys have relied on the non-proliferation treaty in defending protestors charged with criminal trespass while trying to stop the rail shipment of nuclear warheads to the Trident submarine base. This defense has been unsuccessful, largely because courts are leery of dismissing what amounts to a minor act of treason (as a rule - one I tend agree with - you want to discourage people from stopping trains carrying defense materials, unless they have an undisputably sound reason for doing so, from the standpoint of public policy) in favor of a defense based on something so far removed as a U.S. treaty: it's an atomic fly-swatter, so to speak. I'm not suggesting they are correct in rejecting the Treaty defense, for I believe it is a sound reason for stopping Trident. I am suggesting how much real-world weight is normally given to the theoretical legal importance of a U.S. Treaty in a criminal trial. However idealistic you may want or expect our rocket engineers to be, they, too, like judges, must deal with the very real-world problems of life in a non-altruistic society. We cannot hold the engineers responsible for the institutional shortcomings of their employers or NASA. To do so would be the worst form of scapegoat hunting. The M-T engineers violated no treaty or law, save for that imposed by their own consciences. They have committed no war crimes (which from the start was a poorly-chosen analogy to this situation). The unintended deaths of 7 volunteers, doing something whose risks they understood and freely accepted, is a far cry from the mass genocide and war-mongering prosecuted at Nuremburg and Tokyo. To compare the two is absurd and irresponsible, and dilutes the gravity of the concept of a war crime. To be sure, civilians can be prosecuted for war crimes, but there has to be a war. Germany's Krupp family really took it in the shorts at Nuremburg for producing weapons again before the ink had even dried on the Versailles treaty, which specifically prohibited their doing so. I see no parallel in the actions of M-T's engineers. In a sense, the Challenger disaster provides a real opportunity for our society by forcing us to analyze how we create complex systems and make complex decisions in an atmosphere charged with politics and other irrelevant criteria. We can only make this analysis if we refrain from a witch-hunt, tracking down a handful of scapegoats to take the blame, surely a misleading exercise in futility. So you nail a few asses to the wall: there's plenty more where they came from - what have you done to stop them? Look at Lee Iacocca, the marketing genius behind the Ford Pinto, who is now being touted as the next Democratic Presidential contender (Oh Lord, please help us). Some years ago, a grand jury in the midwest indicted the Ford Motor Company and several corporate officers on charges of negligent homocide, arising from the fiery deaths of two little girls in the back seat of a Pinto that was rear-ended, as Lee handed out Dutch-uncle smiles in search of excellence. This was perhaps the first time in our history that a corporate entity was charged with killing. The criminal theory was that Ford knew or should have known that the Pinto's weak and vulnerable fuel-supply system would almost certainly cause deaths which, for a mere $11.00 per car, could have been prevented. Certainly, M-T's blunders were nowhere near as callous as Ford's, yet all parties were later acquitted. If Ford wasn't criminally liable, how can you suggest M-T's engineers are, to the point of comparing them to war criminals, yet? What planet did you say you're from? I feel pretty strongly about this. My country still refuses, for example, to learn anything at all from the very costly private education we received in international relations during the Vietnam conflict. We had to destroy Vietnam to save it, we said, and stop the spread of communism. We conveniently forgot about the fact that, at the close of WWII, Ho Chi Min turned first to the U.S., not to China or the U.S.S.R., for help in creating a true democracy in Vietnam, going so far as to copy almost verbatim our own Declaration of Independence (they might have become a strong ally, instead of just another antagonist at the U.N.), just as we forgot that we turned him down to appease our French allies, who preferred a return to the pre-war splendor of bureaucratic colonial life in Ho's homeland. We ignored the fact that for a thousand years before a French merchant ship dropped anchor off Da Nang in the 1850's, the Vietnamese people had successfully resisted domination by China, whose God-less communist hordes, we were certain, would overpower Vietnam absent the benign protection of the Johnny-come-lately French. We ignored the fact that there was no real democracy in the corrupt government of our democratic ally, and no popular support for it either. Despite whatever we might have learned, revisionists are busy cooking up all kinds of wildly glorified justifications and noble motives for that mis-adventure, as we blithely head down the same by-now familiar and well-worn path toward Nicaragua and, apparently, Libya, too. Instead of taking our lumps and learning something, like any mature adult, we instead try to blame someone. American leadership sometimes has the emotional maturity of a spoiled teenager: "Gimmee gimmee gimmee and you go to hell, and whatever bad that happens to me couldn't possibly be my own doing, so it must be somebody else's fault". We learned nothing from the Iranian hostage crisis, either: we had a handy scapegoat in President Carter, whom Prince Ron and the news showed us to be an inept buffoon who couldn't defend himself from a mere swamp rabbit without a canoe paddle and a shotgun, let alone stop a bunch of moth-eaten wild-eyed young fanatics from kidnapping sacred American citizens. It was Carter's fault, they said, not three decades of oblivious neo-colonial thinking by the U.S. State Department. We preferred to have Carter as a scapegoat, despite the fact that all the hostages came home very much alive: such is the work of an inept buffoon. In the fifties, it was the "Who lost China?" syndrome that cost many people their careers; no one had the vision to question our fundamental cold-war policies of the time. No one, and certainly not Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, considered the possibility that maybe we were wrong in how we viewed the reality of the world, blinded by our own propaganda and the inertia of his holy war against communism. The same line of non-thought took us into southeast Asia. This must reflect some basic attribute of human nature, explored at length by historian Barbara Tuchman in "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam", a book of surprising relevance to the Challenger debate. So long as we insist on viewing disasters as the stupidity of a few, rather than the crude obliviousness of most large organizations, we will continue to build shuttles that blow up, nuclear power plants that come close, bridges that fall down, power blackouts, Pintos, and imposing war memorials to people who die for nothing. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that you are absolutely right, that the M-T engineers were remiss in refusing to risk their careers in the name of your truths and ideals by resigning and holding a press conference, so what? What would have changed? They might have stopped the launch, for awhile, but after they were sacked, what about the next launch, or the next vehicle program? Then what? Who would prevent the next blunder if the only conscientious engineers were long gone, retired early and raising prize gladiolas in their back yards? No, we need these people. Your assertions about legal niceties notwithstanding, they could easily be sacked; it's easier than you think. Look up some recent U.S. labor law decisions -- in the casebooks, not the glib knee-jerk newspaper stories -- and you'll see what I mean. The engineers weren't responsible, legally or morally. They went through channels with their information, channels which exist for good reasons, such as preventing information overload or keeping inaccurate data from reaching critical decision-making nodes within the organization. That the organization chose to push the button anyway reflects a structural weakness in the organization's information-handling ability and is the responsibility of those who maintain the organization: it's decision-makers - the managers, directors, administrators and those who maintain the political matrix within which such decisions are made. _____________________________________________________________________ Turn off the news tonight and pick up a history book. With a little humility, there's no telling what you might learn. Joel Gilman Motorola/Computer X Seattle